Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, there
would be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth of
illusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and the
trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined
impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a
good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subject
is a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the
general combination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination it
is seen that the separate elements have been closely studied from real
objects. And even where we find the charm of ideal elevation with wrong
drawing and fantastic colour, the charm is dependent on the selective
sensibility of the painter to certain real delicacies of form which
confer the expression he longed to render; for apart from this basis of
an effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance of aesthetic
meaning by the painter to the beholder. In this sense it is as true to
say of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that it has a strain of
reality, as to say so of a portrait by Rembrandt, which also has its
strain of ideal elevation due to Rembrandt's virile selective
sensibility. To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it is worth
repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but
intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by
susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it
reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual
confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient
inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every
material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and
stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious
relations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not
that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being more